As a child from the post-war generation I grew up in half a house. The other half had collapsed when the house was bombed. Our apartment had a looong corridor on whose one end was a living room that would be dad’s bedroom at night and a bath room; on the other end a kitchen and the day-room, at night mum’s and my bedroom. When I was very little, there were no doors except for the main access to the apartment. Wood was precious and had been used for heating in cold war winters. Instead curtains gave some privacy. They were made from old coal bags – today’s eco dyers would probably have delighted in the traces of the coal that my mother had not managed to rub or boil out in the wash. She would certainly have preferred better than that, but that came later...
Open-mouthed I used to soak in her stories of how she would trade her only (!) one slice of bread of the daily ration for one (!) cigarette – dreams that went up in smoke were more important than the harsh reality and kept her going, I guess. I remember her as a very beautiful, but VERY skinny woman – not much different to today’s fashion models, except that these can probably buy lots of cigarettes... Dad was only just starting his own business as a photographer. Neither money nor commissions were abundant in the early years. Who needed and could afford a photographer?! Needless to say that very little was thrown away in our household. Things were reused and recycled and misappropriated for something else. We had nothing to throw away.
That’s how I became a hoarder. This trait qualified me greatly for living on a remote island with no significant shops. Do-it-yourself brought out the best in me. One of my great satisfactions was the separation of rubbish. We have one container for burnable waste (only paper and the odd fabric scrap that is REALLY too small to keep and use elsewhere!). Another is for rubbish like empty cans (no eco dyeing, yet!), broken glass, plastic and such. Stuff that will be collected and taken to the dump (from where our art teacher friend Bazza occasionally picks it up – his creativity goes along other lines than mine). Edible waste goes to the pigs and I do no longer have to overeat, "because otherwise the poor black children in Africa starve" – or did I remember something wrong there from my mother’s message??!
Occasionally I intend to free my house and studio of too much clutter, but often this good intention doesn’t go far beyond the sorting and re-arranging stage. Often, the day after I have bravely thrown something away and the rubbish truck came and got it I would have needed exactly that something...
I am therefore glad I kept this piece of lace that had served me to try materials I wanted to work with during my recent studies. It hung on my soft-board studio wall, usually in my way when using the wall for photographing something pinned to it, as a screen for the overhead projector for enlarging or just to pin up a new composition. It was pinned here and there, but never banned to one of the boxes that contain my UFOs (translation for non-artists: ‘Un-Finished Objects’) where I would probably have lost it from sight and therefore mind.
I'm glad for a reason: It is now the centre piece of a new panel. I added two lengths of interfacing to either side and extended parts of the pieces patterns so they meander down the new sides, holding pieces of delicate tapa as embellishments. I like this combination, as it juxtaposes the entirely man-made non-woven cloth with the natural material, fibres bonded and spread out thin. Both are strong and hardly breakable in the direction the fibres run. They are soft, though, and delicate to handle when wet. Bark cloth is made from the inner bark of certain trees, that means it is – like interfacing’s original purpose – a material between two outer layers, liminal in its changing state.
The way I intend to hang this panel will enable the centre piece to cast a shadow – on a surface more suitable for display than my raggedy lawn. Today the bright south-seas sun supplied the best of all spotlights, so I had to take advantage. I was hoping to show you the shadow and that’s how it got me thinking about those shadows of the past...
